Janie Hampton - How the Girl Guides Won the War

Mention Girl Guides to many women, and the reaction will be strong. They will tell you either that they loved them or hated them; they were either proud to wear their uniform or refused to join. Once enrolled, they either adored tying knots or couldn’t see the point; revelled in campfire singing or loathed damp canvas tents. They either fell in love with their Captains, or thought they were fascists and sadists. Whatever their feelings, most former Girl Guides retain strong memories of their experiences.

A survey by Girlguiding UK in 2007 found that two-thirds of Britain’s most prominent women have been Guides, and three-quarters of them say they benefited from the experience. Yet few people realise the impact that the foundation of the Guide movement in 1910 had on women’s equality, and on society in general. From the very start, when Robert Baden-Powell asked his sister Agnes to form the Girl Guides, the organisation was separate from the Boy Scouts, and not subservient to them. Baden-Powell died in 1941, but how much has his vision affected the social and political history of feminism in the twentieth century? Nearly twenty years before all British women got the vote, Girl Guides were earning badges for proficiency as Electricians, Cyclists, Surveyors and Telegraphists.

In both world wars, Brownies and Guides took over the jobs of adults. When historians came to write up these wars, they spoke only to adults, who had either not been around or, if they had, were too busy to notice, and thus failed to mention the role of these girls and young women.

The impact of the Guides in World War II is particularly clear. Their activities were not confined to Britain, but also included the Commonwealth, Nazi-occupied Europe and Japanese-occupied Asia. It was World War II that brought the philosophy of the Guides to the fore, and released their skills and training to the benefit of everyone around them.

This book explores how being a Brownie or a Guide was essential training for war work. How did a Guide gaining a badge in Morse code aid fighter pilots? How did collecting 15,000 wooden cotton reels help RAF prisoners of war? And how does Guiding in those times influence the lives of women in the twenty-first century? Within days of the declaration of war with Germany in September 1939, young women were being called up to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), Women’s Royal Navy (Wrens), and the Female Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs). The military services soon realised that Guides with badges sewn on their sleeves had skills that were not only life-enhancing, but also life-saving.

Guides from all walks of life threw themselves into war work. Even Princess Elizabeth, a Guide, and Princess Margaret, a Brownie, learned how to cook on a campfire and promised, like thousands of other Guides, ‘to help other people every day, specially those at home’. When the Blitz began, Guides kept up morale in bomb shelters with ‘Blackout Blues’ sing-songs. They built emergency ovens from the bricks of bombed houses. They grew food on company allotments, and knitted for England. They became the embodiment of the Home Front spirit, digging shelters and providing first-aid. All over Britain, Guides held bazaars and pushed wooden two-wheeled trek carts around the streets, collecting jam jars and newspapers for recycling. In one week in 1940 they raised £50,000 to buy ambulances and a lifeboat which saved lives at Dunkirk.

Guides painted kerbs with white paint to help people find their way around in the blackout. They collected sphagnum moss to dress wounds. They helped evacuated children leave the cities, and helped to care for them when they arrived in the country. War Service Badges were awarded to Guides after ninety-six hours of work, washing up in children’s homes, caring for the elderly, feeding bombed families and Air-Raid Wardens.

Their contribution was noted at the highest levels. At the Lord Mayor’s Show in London in 1942, Winston Churchill took off his hat in salute as the Guides marched past. Movietone newsreels featured Guides putting out incendiary bombs, marching with gas masks and sending messages by semaphore. Older Guides were shown helping on a farm and rowing on a river (they may have been looking out for German parachutists disguised as nuns, a common fear at the time).

Exploring archives, I stumbled across extraordinary stories. A Brownie log book from 1944 surprised me halfway through with a song the pack sang on Christmas Day:

We might have been shipped to Timbuctoo We might have been shipped Kalamazoo It’s not repatriation nor is it yet starvation It’s simply Concentration in Chefoo!

I discovered that from 1942 to 1945 the 1st Chefoo Brownie Pack was based in a Japanese concentration camp. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an entire boarding school of British children was interned in eastern China along with Trappist monks, White Russian prostitutes, businessmen and Cuban jazz players. The morale of the girls and their teachers was greatly improved by their continuing as Brownies and Guides. Their sports were organised by Eric Liddell, the 1924 Olympic gold-medal winner and hero of the film Chariots of Fire . I tracked down their Brown Owl, aged ninety-three and living in Seattle, and several of the girls, who told me how being Brownies had given them stability and normality during those four long years when they were separated from their parents. They led me to other Brownies who had been captured by pirates in the South China Seas in 1935, while on their way to school by ship.

Letters to local newspapers produced wonderful stories, photographs and more log books. The 1st Wantage Brownies went on a camp at the end of August 1939, and although their Brown Owl must have known that war was imminent, you would never guess it from the pictures of them swimming and standing on their heads, or from the brief note that they had had to return home a day early, on Saturday, 2 September.

A scrapbook in the Imperial War Museum revealed that during the war three spinsters from Kent ran a hostel near Perth which was filled with sixty children evacuated from Glasgow. They set up a Brownie pack, a Cub pack and a Guide company which were so well run that Guiders were sent from all over Scotland to train there. When I wrote to the house, the current owner phoned me back: ‘I had no idea of the importance of guiding here. Lady Baden-Powell was my grand-mother-in-law. I knew her well.’ I found one of the Brownies who had lived at the hostel, in Weymouth. Brought up in a tenement in Glasgow, she went on to become Mayor of Weymouth, and put it all down to being a Brownie.

One afternoon I told my husband about a story published in 1947 about a Dutch family who rowed across the English Channel in May 1940. The thirteen-year-old daughter was a Guide, and had used her skills to keep them afloat. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could find her now?’ said my husband. ‘Well, she was called Josephine Klein,’ I replied. He dashed out of the room and returned with a pile of books. ‘These are by Josephine Klein. She’s a leading London psychotherapist. I’ve seen her give a talk, and she’s the right age.’ I found her in Waterloo, and she invited me to visit. We spent a morning with her lying on her therapist’s couch, telling me the whole story, and how Guiding had provided her with instant friendship in a country where she knew nobody.

Guides were among the first civilians to enter Belsen concentration camp, and in the aftermath of World War II their outstanding service continued. Financed by Guides and Brownies from all over the Commonwealth, teams of former Guides and Guiders worked with refugees in Holland, Germany, Greece and Malaya.

When you go camping with only a rucksack, you cannot take all the things you want: you have to choose the most important, and leave the rest behind. I have almost certainly left things out of this book that some people will feel should have been included. Brownies and Guides did so much in World War II that it is impossible to cover even a small amount of it. I hope, however, to give some understanding of the extraordinary and important part that Guides and Brownies played during that time of crisis.